Container Security Firm Aqua Raises $25 Million

Aqua Security, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based container security startup, today announced that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding, bringing the total amount raised by the company to $38.5 million.

Container technologies are becoming increasingly popular among IT decision makers, as they offer a means to deploy applications faster when compared to traditional methods.

Aqua’s Container Security Platform delivers a security solution for containerized environments, and supports both Linux and Windows containers, multiple orchestration environments, both on-premises deployments as well as on AWS, Azure, GCP, and other public clouds.

“On a fundamental level, container security is equivalent to hypervisor security,” F5’s David Holmes explained in a 2015 SecurityWeek column.

Aqua says that it uses a combination of intelligent defaults, machine learning, and threat research to protect container-based applications.

The Series B round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, while existing investors Microsoft Ventures, TLV Ventures and Shlomo Kramer also participated in the round.

“The rapid rise and convergence of DevOps, containers, and microservices-based applications is an opportunity to rethink application security.” said Chris Schaepe, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Aqua’s success in leveraging containers to improve security provides visible customer value, as evident from the impressive customer adoption that the team at Aqua achieved in a very short time.”

According to a 2015 survey of 272 IT decision makers in North America conducted by container security specialist Twistlock, 91 percent of the respondents said they were concerned about the security of containers.

Founded in 2015, Aqua says two of the 10 largest financial services companies and three of the world’s top 10 software companies are customers. The company has office locations in San Francisco, CA, Burlington, MA, and London, UK.

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.